From Abracadabra to Zombies

What's the harm? No. 3

These links and comments illustrate the harm
done by occult, paranormal, pseudoscientific, and supernatural
beliefs. The harm may be tangible and easily documented:
physical, financial, or interpersonal.

September 18, 2006. If someone tries to sell
you a candle that will reverse your fortune from bad to good when you burn
it, walk away. Otherwise, you are the one who will get burned. Even if the
seller is a kind, motherly type, walk away. If you don't believe me,
ask Judy. She didn't walk away. The candle cost her $1,500 and over a
two-year period she gave her new best psychic friend over $15,000. In
exchange, she was left with a red face.

July 27, 2006.
BBC
reports: A television documentary team has pieced together details
surrounding the case of a 16-year-old girl, executed two years ago in Iran.
On 15 August, 2004, Atefah Sahaaleh was hanged in a public square in the
Iranian city of Neka. Her death sentence was imposed for "crimes against
chastity." The state-run newspaper accused her of adultery and described her
as 22 years old. But she was not married - and she was just 16. She was
abused by the moral police and raped by Ali Darabi, a 51-year-old former
revolutionary guard, married with children.

July 21,
2006. ABC News has a story about one of the more common ways by
which harm comes to those who believe in psychics:
You are cursed; pay me and I'll remove the curse. In this case, the victim
gave the psychic $220,000 in cash and jewelry over a period of time. To con
people, start small and escalate gradually. Appear sincere and give the
impression that you are spiritual and trustworthy. Convince the client that
skeptics and doubters are evil and never do anyone any good. Play and prey
on the client's wants and fears. And, if possible, use trickery to make the
client think you have extraordinary magical powers. Convince yourself that
your clients are fools who get what they deserve.

To avoid being conned, read the books reviewed
here. (Pay
particular attention to Bob Steiner's warning: you too can get taken!

July 18, 2006. Children are dying of
measles again and not only in third-world countries. Also, children who
aren't being vaccinated are endangering other children they come in contact
with, especially those with weakened immune systems. Throughout Europe, many parents have stopped bringing in their
children in for the MMR vaccination. Cases of measles in England are at a 20-year high following the collapse in MMR immunization rates.*
The panic is due to at least two things:
Andrew
Wakefield and widespread belief that governments are conspiring with
pharmaceutical firms to hide the truth about vaccines. An investigation of
misconduct by Wakefield was initiated by Britain's General Medical Council
after The Lancet publicly rejected his findings about an MMR/autism
link. Wakefield failed to reveal that he had received £55,000 in legal aid
to carry out separate research for parents who claimed their children had
been harmed by the MMR vaccine.*

We now know that Wakefield was paid more than £400,000
by lawyers trying to prove that the vaccine was unsafe. The payments were
part of £3.4m distributed from the legal aid fund to doctors and scientists
who had been recruited to support a now failed lawsuit against vaccine
manufacturers.*

There is strong evidence that there is no connection between MMR vaccines,
which have never contained thimerosal,* and autism or any other disorder.

A recent study found that "There is no
relationship between the level of exposure to MMR vaccines and
thimerosal-containing vaccines and rates of autism."*
The Canadian study surveyed 27,749 children born from 1987 to 1998 in the
Montreal area and was published in the journal
Pediatrics. It is the latest of several studies to reach this
conclusion. See also:

July 11, 2006. Hellfried Sartori, 67, is
being held on charges of fraud and practicing medicine without a license in
Chiang Mai, Thailand. "Police allege that several ill foreigners traveled to
Thailand with false hopes for his cures, only to die after receiving
injections of a dangerous chemical compound bought for $A50,000 from Sartori."*
Sartori is accused of luring terminally ill foreigners to Thailand with
promises of a miracle cure, something he has been doing for many years. He
offers "alternative" cancer treatments such as
chelation therapy and
ozone
treatment. He has had his medical license revoked twice in the U.S.
during the 1980s, once in Maryland and once in the District of Columbia.
He's been jailed at least twice, in New York State in May 1992 and
Washington in July 1998, for illegally administering his so-called "ozone
treatments."

Sartori has his defenders. Keith Preston's wife died after traveling from
Australia to Maharaj Nakhon Chiang Mai Hospital in Thailand to be treated by
Sartori. She had been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. Mr. Preston
supports Sartori because he offered hope when Australian doctors had sent
his wife home to die.*
Given that many people prefer false hope to accepting mortality, quacks
like Sartori will always find a vulnerable clientele willing to spend large
sums of money in the vain hope of beating death.

May 10, 2006. Another cleansing scam. Whenever
a psychic claims to need your money or valuables so they can be cleansed,
she is preparing to take you to the cleaners. Here is another example from
Florida. Linda Marks claimed she was a gypsy and could peer into the
future. She liked to conjure snakes and scorpions out of chickens’ eggs and
turn water blood-red. These parlor tricks would frighten gullible clients
into believing that their lives were infected by evil spirits. The solution,
she told them, was for them to give her all their money so she could pray
over it and "cleanse" it of evil. They did, to the tune of about
$2 million. Once they did so, the gypsy and the money
would disappear, as if by magic. Ms. Marks will have four years in prison to
perfect her art and repay the money she stole from her mostly elderly
clients.

April 21, 2006.
The
Netherlands is considering tougher laws on practitioners of
complementary medicine after government health
inspectors severely criticized the treatment given actress and comedienne
Sylvia Millecam who died from breast cancer in 2001. An investigation found
that alternative practitioners contradicted the diagnosis of breast cancer
made by her doctors and offered her instead the prospect of a cure with
"unfounded methods of treatment."

April 13, 2006.
Consegrity co-founder
dies of untreated diabetes while she and her partner apply their patented
brand of energy healing.

Clairvoyant and psychic mailings are also highlighted
by the OFT as a growing fraud. In this scam, letters from a clairvoyant
promising good luck (e.g. winning lottery numbers) or predicting bad omens
are sent out requesting that recipients send money for an 'intervention'
from the psychic to prevent the bad luck. OFT chief executive John Fingleton
said: "Do not think that you can't be taken in by a scam. We may believe we
are too savvy or streetwise to fall for these cons, but they target
different people in different ways to exploit our weaknesses and take our
money."
VNUnet

February 4, 2006. Coretta Scott King, civil rights leader and widow of
Martin Luther King, Jr., spent her last days at a clinic in Rosarito Beach
run by Kurt Donsbach, a chiropractor whose "alternative treatments" for
incurable diseases are illegal in this country. Since 1983 he has been
selling hope to the dying and desperate at his
Santa Monica Health
Institute, which he moved from Chula Vista, California, to a few miles
south of the border in 1987.
Quackwatch founder Dr. Stephen Barrett, who has investigated thousands
of health-related scams, has been
monitoring Donsbach since 1971. Barrett says: "I know of nobody who has
engaged in a greater number and variety of health-related schemes and
scams."

Donsbach was sentenced to a year in federal prison in
1997 for smuggling more than $250,000 worth of unapproved drugs into the US
from Mexico. He never served a day of the sentence, however. In 1988, the US
postal service ordered Donsbach to stop claiming that a hydrogen peroxide
solution he sold could prevent cancer and ease arthritis pain.

The 78-year-old King was just one of many desperate
souls who have been lured to the Mexican clinic over the past twenty years
to be treated with vitamins and herbs, iron lungs, and other useless
procedures. (Mrs. King was partially paralyzed from a stroke last August. She
was brought to the clinic by her daughter, Bernice King, and a nurse. The
clinic was recommended by members of Mrs. King's church.) Donsbach was
tutored by Royal Lee (d. 1967), who, until the rise of
Kevin Trudeau, was, in the words of a
prominent FDA official, "probably the largest publisher of unreliable and
false nutritional information in the world."

On his
website, Donsbach appears to be a sweet old man who serves up big
helpings of fruits and vegetable and other nutritious things. In reality,
he's just another healing arts huckster who appeals to the desperate and
dying who have too much unhealthy faith and not enough healthy skepticism.
Donsbach's partner in crime is
Harry R. Alsleben,
another quack who, like Donsbach, used to run his own correspondence school,
which offered pseudo-credentials in nutrition, e.g. "Clinical Nutrimedicine
and Biological Sciences," "nutri-medical dentistry," "nutri-medical eye and
visual health care," "nutri-medical homeopathy," and "therapeutic
nutrimedicine."

How do such quacks flourish? They sell a good story
and a few of their clients survive and can serve as endorsements. The dead,
of course, don't testify, as they aren't around to tell their story. And,
unless one is famous, as Mrs. King was, the press won't do any stories on
your visit to places such as the Santa Monica Health Institute. King was
near death (from ovarian cancer that had spread to her intestines) when she
was brought to the clinic, so, while she was admitted, no treatment was
administered.

The Santa Monica clinic was closed shortly after Mrs.
King's death and patients were given three days to leave the country. No
reason was given for the closure.*

The body of Coretta Scott King was brought to Atlanta,
where she became the first African American and first woman to lie in state
at the Georgia Capitol.

January 17, 2006. A cleansing ritual by three psychics cleaned out a
Poolesville, Maryland, woman's savings of $100,000. She believed that she
was under a centuries old curse and that the cleansing ritual would rid her
of the curse, according to police spokesperson Lucille Baur.

One of the dangers of believing in
curses is the fear they
cause of impending trouble and doom, which makes believers vulnerable to
those who claim they can lift curses through such means as "cleansing
rituals." The psychics tell the victim that they must give them their money
or valuables for the ritual; they promise to return the goods after the
ritual, minus any fees. That is usually the last anyone sees of the
psychics, unless the police catch up with them.

January 5, 2006. Anything goes, if God exists. When men believe they
have the word of God, they may do anything and claim it is God's will.
Militant Muslims in Afghanistan believe the Koran forbids girls from being
educated or being educated by men or being educated with boys or being
educated by men with boys or ???? They also believe that if a man teaches
girls they (the Taliban) have the right or duty to kill him. That's what
they did to Malim Abdul Habib in Qalat, the capital of Zabul province. Habib
was head of Shaikh Mathi Baba, a coeducational secondary school with 1,300
pupils. According to news reports, several armed thugs broke into Habib's
house and ordered him to report to a local Taliban leader. He refused and
was dragged into a courtyard and beheaded in front of his family.

For the past several months, threatening notices
calling for an end to the education of girls have been pinned to shop walls
in the town. According to the
Guardian, last month gunmen pulled a teacher in Helmand province
from his classroom and shot him at the school gate after he ignored orders
to stop teaching girls.

About harm

It is difficult to assess the harm done to society and the
world at large by the spread and encouragement of
anti-scientific, irrational, and magical thinking. It is also
difficult to measure the extent of harm done to individuals
and their families who give up thinking for themselves to
follow some guru astrologer, psychic, or cult leader.

It is
impossible to calculate the losses to those bilked because
they are ignorant of basic logical and psychological
principles.